"Hatebase" can help distinguish between angry noise and systematic hate speech.

The use of hate speech to dehumanize people is widely recognized as one of the first steps towards genocide. From Rwanda, where Hutu radio stations blared out propaganda referring to Tutsis as "cockroaches," to Nazi Germany, where Jews were likened to a disease that needed to be cleansed from society, hate speech has been a clear warning sign of terrible things to come.

Hatebase, a new crowdsourced database of multilingual hate speech from The Sentinel Project, is an attempt to create a repository of words and phrases that researchers can use to detect the early stages of genocide.

"How many people outside of Sri Lanka know that 'sakkiliya' is a Sinhala term used to refer to a Tamil person as 'a very unhygienic or uncultured person'," Christopher Tuckwood, executive director of The Sentinel Project, told Wired.co.uk. "Hatebase helps us to know what to look for and to make sense of what we see."

Front-end users can log on to the website and add examples of hate speech from their communities, and also record location-specific "sightings," while developers can use an authenticating API that allows them to mesh Hatebase data with other tools for genocide prevention.

"Our intention with Hatebase was for the data to be used as a contextual layer on top of other monitoring datasets and infrastructure," Hatebase's developer Timothy Quinn told Wired.co.uk. "It's essentially acting as a sort of Z-axis to escalate or lessen threat severity and allow NGOs to redeploy resources accordingly."

Anyone who's spent a short amount of time online will know that hate speech isn't in short supply. The challenge is distinguishing between low-level background noise and systematic hate speech that could be the beginning of something worse.

"Hatebase gives us a reference point for what we should be listening for—picking that signal out of the noise—and then help with quantifying it. The real trick is to then connect those hate speech trends with other real-world phenomena," says Tuckwood. "For example, we've seen some hint of a possible correlation between when Iranian officials make anti-Baha'i statements and when there are upticks in attacks such as vandalism or arson on members of that religious minority."

Launched on 25 March, the database is still in its early stages, but the developers say that further functionality will be added in the coming months. In the future Hatebase may become a valuable tool for NGOs trawling through vast amounts of online communication, providing "a layer of relevance which complements other context-based information sources, not unlike traffic congestion layered onto a city map."

Pre-crime? Also, are certain races excluded (i.e., "God gave it to me" on Canaan)?

It's obviously not "pre-crime" if they are correlating speech to actions (e.g. "For example, we've seen some hint of a possible correlation between when Iranian officials make anti-Baha'i statements and when there are upticks in attacks such as vandalism or arson on members of that religious minority."). "Pre-crime" there would be no actions to correlate to.

Your second question seems needlessly cynical. Obviously not in their mission statement, but you can always hold your judgment until they actually have a database and you can look for yourself, since it's viewable.

It'd be interesting to see this applied to America's racist hotspots and to political speech as well. Can it predict violence against abortion providers, or be used for counter-terrorism efforts, for example.

Interesting approach, however, I sincerely hope there are native speakers actually involved in the project and they don't just pluck random phrases and parse them through their own interpretations.

E.G.

Quote:

"How many people outside of Sri Lanka know that 'sakkiliya' is a Sinhala term used to refer to a Tamil person as 'a very unhygienic or uncultured person'," Christopher Tuckwood, executive director of The Sentinel Project, told Wired.co.uk

The word "sakkilya" does mean a generally unclout boob, however it's not specific to a race; at least not in today's society. I'm uncertain of the origin, but it's not uncommon to hear mothers call their own children the word (especially if they're reluctant to shower). Likewise a word like "nondi" which means roughly to be humiliated (usually self-inflicted humiliation) doesn't have specific racial barbs either, although it's origin is Tamil. Regardless, these are not words to be used in civil discourse.

Source: I'm ethnic Sinhalese with Tamil people in the family.

There's little room for misinterpretation when someone's openly dehumanizing an entire group of people, and/or advocating violence against them, but mere words and terms out of context takes a lot more than a weighed graph to infer intent.

We also need to be cautious of how we use this information once the graphs come up to speed, lest we direct ourselves toward a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nothing fuels paranoia and mistrust more than censorship. Even moreso when it's preemptive censorship.

And sometimes, the seething problems of society aren't openly discussed until it all suddenly explodes with just one trigger; like dropping a fork into a cup of supercritically heated water.

Interesting approach, however, I sincerely hope there are native speakers actually involved in the project and they don't just pluck random phrases and parse them through their own interpretations.

E.G.

Quote:

"How many people outside of Sri Lanka know that 'sakkiliya' is a Sinhala term used to refer to a Tamil person as 'a very unhygienic or uncultured person'," Christopher Tuckwood, executive director of The Sentinel Project, told Wired.co.uk

The word "sakkilya" does mean a generally unclout boob, however it's not specific to a race; at least not in today's society. I'm uncertain of the origin, but it's not uncommon to hear mothers call their own children the word (especially if they're reluctant to shower). Likewise a word like "nondi" which means roughly to be humiliated (usually self-inflicted humiliation) doesn't have specific racial barbs either, although it's origin is Tamil. Regardless, these are not words to be used in civil discourse.

Source: I'm ethnic Sinhalese with Tamil people in the family.

There's little room for misinterpretation when someone's openly dehumanizing an entire group of people, and/or advocating violence against them, but mere words and terms out of context takes a lot more than a weighed graph to infer intent.

We also need to be cautious of how we use this information once the graphs come up to speed, lest we direct ourselves toward a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nothing fuels paranoia and mistrust more than censorship. Even moreso when it's preemptive censorship.

And sometimes, the seething problems of society aren't openly discussed until it all suddenly explodes with just one trigger; like dropping a fork into a cup of supercritically heated water.

"Cockroach" doesn't have an inherent linguistic link to rascism either, nor does "disease". It was when those words started to be used consistently to label a particular group (e.g. Tutsis and Jews are the examples given here) that changed. Knowing the language is important but you're also looking for changing trends, which means you also need to be there.

Interesting approach, however, I sincerely hope there are native speakers actually involved in the project and they don't just pluck random phrases and parse them through their own interpretations.

E.G.

Quote:

"How many people outside of Sri Lanka know that 'sakkiliya' is a Sinhala term used to refer to a Tamil person as 'a very unhygienic or uncultured person'," Christopher Tuckwood, executive director of The Sentinel Project, told Wired.co.uk

The word "sakkilya" does mean a generally unclout boob, however it's not specific to a race; at least not in today's society. I'm uncertain of the origin, but it's not uncommon to hear mothers call their own children the word (especially if they're reluctant to shower). Likewise a word like "nondi" which means roughly to be humiliated (usually self-inflicted humiliation) doesn't have specific racial barbs either, although it's origin is Tamil. Regardless, these are not words to be used in civil discourse.

Source: I'm ethnic Sinhalese with Tamil people in the family.

There's little room for misinterpretation when someone's openly dehumanizing an entire group of people, and/or advocating violence against them, but mere words and terms out of context takes a lot more than a weighed graph to infer intent.

We also need to be cautious of how we use this information once the graphs come up to speed, lest we direct ourselves toward a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nothing fuels paranoia and mistrust more than censorship. Even moreso when it's preemptive censorship.

And sometimes, the seething problems of society aren't openly discussed until it all suddenly explodes with just one trigger; like dropping a fork into a cup of supercritically heated water.

I think that the concept is to look for trends outside of the natural use of the words or terms.

When a group is planning or organizing a genocide there is a deliberate concerted information campaign.

In regular political campaigns activists are given scripted talking points. Its the kind of un natural scripts that can be tracked and won't really occur naturally or randomly.

There's no mention of censorship here. It's more like, we need to start setting up refugee camps and sending peacekeepers...In fact censorship would break the system, if the speech was censored then it would conceal the genocide warning signs.

There's little room for misinterpretation when someone's openly dehumanizing an entire group of people, and/or advocating violence against them, but mere words and terms out of context takes a lot more than a weighed graph to infer intent.

We also need to be cautious of how we use this information once the graphs come up to speed, lest we direct ourselves toward a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nothing fuels paranoia and mistrust more than censorship. Even moreso when it's preemptive censorship.

And sometimes, the seething problems of society aren't openly discussed until it all suddenly explodes with just one trigger; like dropping a fork into a cup of supercritically heated water.[/quote]

I find your points to be very important , especially when paired with first hand knowledge.Context is critically important and is also continuously shifting, look merely at the common trend for terms of derision and scorn to be adopted by the very community being attacked and used to self identify and bind the group together. I often notice a tendency for linguistic practitioners to be inclined to drift towards making almost absolutist empirical statements of truth or deterministic predictions, ... While at the same time extremely frustrating to argue with in pubs as they often seem to redefine terms mid discussion ... As if the words used to discuss the word exist in a platonic idealized hegemony over the poor pale physical plane they describe,

. ... But that could just be a bias I've picked up over the years dealing with Pinter and Chomsky devotees

It's interesting to watch how Social Media is becoming a data source for, well... everything. I wish them luck in their study.

CaptainTightpants wrote:

It'd be interesting to see this applied to America's racist hotspots and to political speech as well. Can it predict violence against abortion providers, or be used for counter-terrorism efforts, for example.

Any scanning of news sources for the drum beating of war? I guess it's always up to where they want to point their machinations, much like the media itself. The relatively new word, "Islamist," in that database? It's a pretty effective tool at expressing whom the reader should believe are the "good guys" in any given story regarding Muslims... considering the West's "peace initiatives" in the Middle East...

In fact, without the “culture” of denigration and the automated centralized processing of such people, the holocaust would not even have been *possible*!

My grandma, who lived through those times here in Germany, got *seriously* angry when I explained what this is to her. She can still remember the people who told the Nazis about people hiding somewhere or trying to fight the Nazis.You know what happened to those collaborators after the war was over? Within days, they all were hung in the town churches.

It’s sad to see the USA steer in that exact direction as the Nazis, Stalin’s Russia, the GDR, etc, once again… this time paired with rampaging greed and a nationwide state of mental illness (religious schizophrenia)… both built on systematic dumbing-down through cutbacks on education and reserach combined with noxious “food”… and fueled by a few egomaniacal psychopaths on a greed trip taking all that money for themselves.

Given what you are ranting about has no correlation to what the article is about, I can certainly understand why she would be livid... try going back to her after you re-read the article, focusing on comprehension this time, and then be a dear and try correcting your mistake with her.

Cue the rush of misanthropic, closet racist IT nerds to call this political correctness run amok. I think something like this could've tipped off the international community months in advance before the brutal genocide in Rwanda (where ethnic tensions between Hutu and Tutsi had been boiling for years before the first massacre).

We need to carefully consider the channels through which the data is obtained. Not all hate speech can be scraped from social media and even radio and TV broadcasts. There are societies and places of worship for example. Indeed, a lot of news travels by word of mouth, which in this day and age includes phone calls to friends and relatives. I'm not trying to imply it's not worth trying to monitor the trends, just saying this method may not be as effective as hoped. Well, even one life saved in good time is worth all the effort!

I hope we can return to some sane discourse here, because this project does raise some very important points. Back on topic...

Madestjohn wrote:

I often notice a tendency for linguistic practitioners to be inclined to drift towards making almost absolutist empirical statements of truth or deterministic predictions, ... While at the same time extremely frustrating to argue with in pubs as they often seem to redefine terms mid discussion ... As if the words used to discuss the word exist in a platonic idealized hegemony over the poor pale physical plane they describe...

Inferring meaning is a very tricky thing, no doubt, intent often trickier, but there are some things that can be attributed to ignorance or outright hatred right away. Intent of the speaker in this case is a matter of community will, whether the speaker really did intend it or not. For better or for worse, that's default judgment by consensus.

This is why they really should have as many native speakers as possible; preferably those still living in those regions so cultural context can also come to play.

I left Sri Lanka as a young lad and, although I'm still fluent in Sinhalese, obviously there are plenty of chances for to me to miss something that's innocent on the surface, but seething with hatred below. With languages like Sinhalese, witchcraft with intent is comparatively simple.

G1itch wrote:

There's no mention of censorship here. It's more like, we need to start setting up refugee camps and sending peacekeepers...In fact censorship would break the system, if the speech was censored then it would conceal the genocide warning signs.

Very true, but we've all seen the knee-jerk panic police censors rush in for other things. Besides, the stigma of even being implied a radical/hate ridden venue is sponsorship poison for most broadcasters, so I hope whatever power this database will wield will be done wisely and sensibly.

"In 2009, NAF member Dr. George Tiller was shot and killed in his church in Wichita, Kansas."

It's true that violence has dropped off since the late 1990s. It is not a liberal fantasy that "such things happen anymore." Furthermore, were it possible to retroactively apply this database to online and written communication in the anti-abortion lobby, it's possible that communication trends that *did* imply an uptick in violent crime was imminent could be detected.

Anti-choice violence has waned since the 1990s. That doesn't mean it's impossible for such violence to grow in the future.

I hope we can return to some sane discourse here, because this project does raise some very important points. Back on topic...

Madestjohn wrote:

I often notice a tendency for linguistic practitioners to be inclined to drift towards making almost absolutist empirical statements of truth or deterministic predictions, ... While at the same time extremely frustrating to argue with in pubs as they often seem to redefine terms mid discussion ... As if the words used to discuss the word exist in a platonic idealized hegemony over the poor pale physical plane they describe...

Inferring meaning is a very tricky thing, no doubt, intent often trickier, but there are some things that can be attributed to ignorance or outright hatred right away. Intent of the speaker in this case is a matter of community will, whether the speaker really did intend it or not. For better or for worse, that's default judgment by consensus.

This is why they really should have as many native speakers as possible; preferably those still living in those regions so cultural context can also come to play.

I left Sri Lanka as a young lad and, although I'm still fluent in Sinhalese, obviously there are plenty of chances for to me to miss something that's innocent on the surface, but seething with hatred below. With languages like Sinhalese, witchcraft with intent is comparatively simple.

G1itch wrote:

There's no mention of censorship here. It's more like, we need to start setting up refugee camps and sending peacekeepers...In fact censorship would break the system, if the speech was censored then it would conceal the genocide warning signs.

Very true, but we've all seen the knee-jerk panic police censors rush in for other things. Besides, the stigma of even being implied a radical/hate ridden venue is sponsorship poison for most broadcasters, so I hope whatever power this database will wield will be done wisely and sensibly.

When was the last time there was a knee-jerk reaction to a potential/actual genocide? Generally it takes thousands of dead in the street and very little warning is actually picked up by the west before any real action is taken.

All they're doing is measuring against the background noise, you're right that you can't infer anything from someone using the word sakkiliya by themselves, but if there is a measurable increase in using the word it should trigger a further look at the text being used with it as well, if it's "we should wipe out the sakkiliya" occurring in numbers that are greater than the expected background noise (there will always be people spouting hate speech on the internet, but right now we generally ignore them), then we may have a problem on our hands and we should look into it more. I very much doubt the UN Security Council will act because something is trending on twitter though, they barely act as it is.

Pre-crime? Also, are certain races excluded (i.e., "God gave it to me" on Canaan)?

It's interesting when the far-left selectively interprets some things in their own unique ways to create bigotry that suits their agenda, while at the same time completely ignoring explicit bigotry in other places. Your unique interpretation of the Bible can be easily debunked by the fact that the early Zionists were hardcore atheists while the vast majority of religious Jews fought strongly against Zionsim, and petitioned governments to oppose the creation of Israel in the UN.

Compare that to the deeply ingrained and institutionalized anti-Semitism that permeates throughout Arab media and culture in modern times where Hitler is praised, Jews are demonised (often with the same language, stereotypes and imagery of the 1930's German media), and the Holocaust is denied; and it's no surprise when Pew Research surveys show that over 95% of Arabs in the three countries that they surveyed (Lebanon, Egypt and Jordan) hold anti-Semitic views.

This database will reveal that kind of explicit bigotry that exists today. It won't show your own imagined bigotry based on your own unique spin of a quote from a two thousand year old book.

We need to carefully consider the channels through which the data is obtained. Not all hate speech can be scraped from social media and even radio and TV broadcasts. There are societies and places of worship for example. Indeed, a lot of news travels by word of mouth, which in this day and age includes phone calls to friends and relatives. I'm not trying to imply it's not worth trying to monitor the trends, just saying this method may not be as effective as hoped. Well, even one life saved in good time is worth all the effort!

This is a crowd-sourced database. Not a database of crowd speech. Crowdsourced means that they are opening it up for submissions from the crowd, so it comes from many sources. It's not just based on a search of social media sites, or even radio and TV. The FAQ indicates they are particularly looking for "overheard" speech.

We need to carefully consider the channels through which the data is obtained. Not all hate speech can be scraped from social media and even radio and TV broadcasts. There are societies and places of worship for example. Indeed, a lot of news travels by word of mouth, which in this day and age includes phone calls to friends and relatives. I'm not trying to imply it's not worth trying to monitor the trends, just saying this method may not be as effective as hoped. Well, even one life saved in good time is worth all the effort!

We need to carefully consider the channels through which the data is obtained. Not all hate speech can be scraped from social media and even radio and TV broadcasts. There are societies and places of worship for example. Indeed, a lot of news travels by word of mouth, which in this day and age includes phone calls to friends and relatives. I'm not trying to imply it's not worth trying to monitor the trends, just saying this method may not be as effective as hoped. Well, even one life saved in good time is worth all the effort!

This is a crowd-sourced database. Not a database of crowd speech. Crowdsourced means that they are opening it up for submissions from the crowd, so it comes from many sources. It's not just based on a search of social media sites, or even radio and TV. The FAQ indicates they are particularly looking for "overheard" speech.

Pardon my misperception. I think it will serve as a useful early-warning tool. I was considering that in some potentially unstable areas in the world, for rough example North Korea or Mali, most people are not (well) connected to the Internet in the first place. If some sort of genocide or massacre were to happen, the signs might go undetected until many have been killed.

And actions are louder than words. What if there is not much hate speech, but people get killed randomly based on their ethnicity? It's not genocide yet, but a victim here today, another there tomorrow. What if this leads to a cascade of mutual retaliations, setting the stage for some real massacre

Lies, even in the same argument, the only defense you have. Not every conservative is as dumb and insincere as you, I won't even bother to make the broad-based claims against them.

You dismiss them as "background violence", but this is ideologically-driven terrorism. Not someone getting stabbed in the street.

Moderation: flagged for trolling.

No, what I did was presented you with actual facts regarding the matter at hand, and you, in typical leftist fashion decided to ignore them to pursue your ideology instead. This is why the right hates the left with such passion.

You ignore every attempt at reasonable discourse because you aren't reasonable.

"In 2009, NAF member Dr. George Tiller was shot and killed in his church in Wichita, Kansas."

It's true that violence has dropped off since the late 1990s. It is not a liberal fantasy that "such things happen anymore." Furthermore, were it possible to retroactively apply this database to online and written communication in the anti-abortion lobby, it's possible that communication trends that *did* imply an uptick in violent crime was imminent could be detected.

Anti-choice violence has waned since the 1990s. That doesn't mean it's impossible for such violence to grow in the future.

....and that's not a blip on the radar considering normal crime levels in the rest of society. I don't know why you folks can't actually understand the concept of what's being discussed here.

In fact, without the “culture” of denigration and the automated centralized processing of such people, the holocaust would not even have been *possible*!

My grandma, who lived through those times here in Germany, got *seriously* angry when I explained what this is to her. She can still remember the people who told the Nazis about people hiding somewhere or trying to fight the Nazis.You know what happened to those collaborators after the war was over? Within days, they all were hung in the town churches.

It’s sad to see the USA steer in that exact direction as the Nazis, Stalin’s Russia, the GDR, etc, once again… this time paired with rampaging greed and a nationwide state of mental illness (religious schizophrenia)… both built on systematic dumbing-down through cutbacks on education and reserach combined with noxious “food”… and fueled by a few egomaniacal psychopaths on a greed trip taking all that money for themselves.

Nobody's going to throw the entirety of Stormfront in the "FEMA death camps" you paranoid lunatic.

Better these hate groups are out in the open versus acting in concert with politicians in private.

I hope this is an effective preventitive measure... But I have some doubt Rather than being an aberation imposed from top down by cynical politicians these genecidal outburst seem more likley in my opinion to be unfortunately an inate result of popuation dynamics. As population density increases and resources become precieved to be at risk people natural inclinations seem to be to look for some one or some group to scapegoat especially is there are resources that can be optained by doing so. Recent anti hindu out breaks in Bangledesh and anti moslem out breaks in Burma seem to be fairly 'grassroots'. Both definately have some instigators but they seem more to be riding the wave of hatred rather than inciting it. There are some serious considerations that the most classic example of this tendacy in western history also started in some of the densely populated area of europe, (the war of the world doc makes some interesting conections with the rnear continuos greats wars of the early twentith century and the existance of the east west transiberian railway)

I'm also confused as to what we can actually do to head off such outbreaks, most international interventions seem to me to have simply been a regulated inforcement of the ethenic cleansing already started. As simular behaviors have been spotted in chimps this is likley a long standing hominid stagedy.

As we head towards 10 billion people, and if seas do rise and therefore exploitable landmass is reduced, my real worry is that the horrors of the first half of the twentith century will pale incomparison to the possible horrors of the second half of the twentyfirst.

Ps. The way the discussion on this forum has so quickly degenerated into reactionary attacks and dismissive, divisive and derogatory descriptions of others ... Well ... The future of our species looks pretty grim

Ah, and we see the start of more evil. Now, libs can rely on an automated LIE database, full of the LIBS definitions of what THEY believe is the truth, yet is the opposite, which MAY have an occasional sprinkling of valid entries in it just so the libs can factually say, 'but we labeled Jew haters as evil!'. This is scary.

You could simply try not to post antisemitic speech through the public media.

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

—C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock, p. 292.

I'm happy the SPLC gets under your skin so, but they have no actual power in their observations.

Y'all ranting about thoughtcrimes really must have failed in your analogy-related assignments in school because persons who track trends in nationalist/racist thought and practice are tracking (often literal) Nazis, not "Nazi Germany" or whatever sad comparison.

These are private nonprofits like the EFF, not the totalitarian agencies of your bizarre (purely projective) fantasies. You're afraid of people doing to you what you'd love to do to them.

The mid to late 90s were the last big push for such violence. Since then the occasional random incident is background noise vs. the pattern of violence prevalent in normal society.

Facts: the greatest enemy of the liberal.

Your use of polemic phrasing is indicative of a profound lack of thought. However, you're a human being, so I'm going to give you the dignity that you might be accidentally denying others and give you a response.

Firstly, fine, I'll limit this to the United States and not clinics in say, Egypt.

Unfortunately, I have a friend who was forced to walk alone through angry protestors to have a lump removed from her womb, it wasn't a baby and never would be, but because it involved a surgical procedure there, our local hospitals told her she had to go to an abortion clinic. She walked through protestors calling her a whore, a slut, a murderer - among other things.

That's violence, that is psychological violence and systematic dehumanization that leads to physical violence. What happened to Sandra Fluke was violence that, if our societal inhibition against stoning promiscuous women wasn't so high, would have resulted in her facing similar persecution other women that stand up for their rights to decide what to do with their body: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... usly-crude (Work warning: Topless picture).

Yes the shootings and bombings at abortion clinics have stopped - because people responded to a very real 'boogeyman' strongly enough to put a halt to it. Now the threats are being made to the federal government by insurrectionist extremists under the guise of protecting second amendment rights, rather than a 'liberal' attack on morality. However, I can tell you that my friend, when she went in through those protestors, was very afraid for her safety.

So, to answer the Captain's question - yes - this can predict violence against abortion clinics/women who have had abortions in a community as well as it can predict violence targeted at any single building or person of similar notoriety.